Waiting outside the Upwey supermarket for my son to come back from the city, a 57-minute journey in the dark. It’s a big journey for a shy and gentle 16-year-old. Waiting in the cold. Suddenly, an electric SUV stops at the pedestrian crossing and the car following behind, an older red Corolla, slams on the…
February 2020: I had just finished a board meeting at the property technology startup that I was working with, and it felt good. The numbers were heading in the right direction, we had traction. It was going to be a good year. In an excellent demonstration of the developed and developing world dichotomy, it was…
On the 30th of March in 1918, while the so-called Great War was raging in Europe, there was a land auction on the Holly Hill Estate in the Dandenongs. The land was owned by William Breen and the auction conducted by Coghill and Haughton, respectable auctioneers based in the city, 42 kilometres to the west….
Before Uber came to the hills if you wanted to be picked up from Upper Ferntree Gully Railway station, 41 kilometres from the centre of Melbourne, the taxi driver would confirm the pick up address as ‘Upper Gully Rail’. Often there would be a long wait and I would have to relocate to the pub,…
Reveries of a solitary walker or Les rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire by Jean Jacques Rousseau is one of the first modern love stories dedicated to the art of walking. Written near the end of his life, Rousseau reflects on his life and his perceived persecutions for his ideas. The writing is quite beautiful with Rousseau…
After 12 years in many different roles, I have moved on from Melbourne IT. When I started as a contractor in the development team, the company had had two massive rounds of redundancies and was busy transitioning from being the monopoly registrar of .com.au domain names in Australia, to registrar of domains in a competitive…
Bertie Gladwin was 91 when he graduated with distinction with a Masters degree in military intelligence. Having left school at 14, Gladwin started his studies after retiring in the 1980s to keep his mind active and has since completed three degrees. The tech world is obsessed by the wunderkind, the boy genius who discovers a…
Here’s a few things online that inspired, delighted, and interested me. Holy Grail of eCommerce Conversion Optimization – 91 Point Checklist and Infographic Despite continuing the trend of very very long lists as link-bait, this is an impressive list of optimisation tactics for ecommerce websites. Whether you’re selling pajamas, concert tickets, shoes or shaving blades;…
Some fiction about the anxieties of Monday You know how it works. You wake, get in the shower, brush your teeth, chuck on some clothes, grab some toast and your bag, and rush out the door. It’s like any other Monday. At the train station there is a man you don’t recognise from the normal…
My reading was a mixed bag last week covering digital, business, and inspirational. Here’s some of it: The Dunbar Number, From the Guru of Social Networks – Businessweek Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar studied how the English sent Christmas cards and discovered that humans can only maintain meaningful relationships with a maximum of 150 people. Read…